Polish nationalism and national ambiguity in Weimar Upper Silesia

Abstract

This was the pessimistic report of one Polish newspaper in Upper Silesia in early 1927. Nearly six years after the plebiscite vote, Polish nationalists on the German side of partitioned Upper Silesia felt their movement under threat. Yet this threat did not come primarily, as one might expect, from the continued national rancor and repression from the plebiscite era. Rather than fearing German nationalists or the German state, Polish nationalists most feared the nationally ambiguous Upper Silesian. Committed Poles had been working in schools, churches, youth leagues, and politics throughout the 1920s to bolster the national loyalty of those Upper Silesians who remained on the German side of the partition border, but were deemed ethnically Polish. Yet their efforts were failing. Speaking of these supposedly Polish families, the same article claimed ‘they lack Polish newspapers and Polish books and the children don’t attend the Polish schools, but rather belong to German youth and sport clubs. These are the lukewarm, if not yet entirely lost, families.’2The battle for national loyalties continued in Upper Silesia after 1921 – but the battle lines were not merely between Germans and Poles, but just as often between nationalists and their targets of nationalization. The Upper Silesian plebiscite of 1921 was intended to settle the nationalquestion in the region. But, as the following decades showed, the plebiscite in fact achieved the opposite. Rather than end the territorial contestation of Upper Silesia between Germany and Poland, it only escalated the battle. And rather than separate the region into two stable national groups, the plebiscite only heightened widespread practices of national ambiguity, as many Upper Silesians resisted defining themselves according to strict national categories. This chapter explores the interaction in the Weimar era between these two unintended outcomes of the plebiscite: between the efforts of state and nationalist actors to revise the partition by hardening national divisions, and the defiant response of many locals who refused to embrace a single national loyalty. As I argue, the two processes were in fact causally linked: nationalist activism bred national ambiguity, which in turn frustrated activists, leading them to embrace forced racial division as a solution. The result was a feedback loop between national ambiguity and radicalism.